Lut Gaye || لٹ گۓ

THIRTY | Thirty Kisses (Part One)

"taaray gintay gintay so gaya."

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THE world around her crumbled into pieces.

With her breath stuck in her lungs, the ground trembling beneath her feet, and heart pounding bruising beats in her chest, Iman struggled hard to remain steady. Her ears throbbed with a consistent, needle-like buzz of the words she had just heard:

He was in the hospital.

He had gotten injured in an operation conducted against criminals.

He was shot.

Her mind reeled—heart screamed. Zain. Zain. Zain. He was hurt. He was in the hospital. He—

All the foreboding whispers she had been trying to quell since morning returned full-force, smote her like an avalanche, and now she did not have a shred of grit left to withstand it. She collapsed onto the couch in the living room with pinpricks of hot tears forming in her eyes.

"Bhabhi, please get a hold of yourself!" Arsal, who had just broken the dreaded news, rushed to her side, hurriedly adding, "He is fine."

Her rheumy gaze met his temperate spheres of hazel. "You just said he is in the hospital, how can he be fine?!"

"Well, what I mean is that he is out of danger," Arsal told her in a calm voice that was supposed to console but it did little to mitigate her misery.

"Is he ever?" Iman croaked out, the query turning into an ache that became more pressing, extremely agonizing with each passing moment.

It surged within her then, a piercing, maddening urge to run to him. To see him, hold him, soothe him, and make sure he was alright. She felt like her heart was going to stop beating if she didn't—if she spent another minute away from him.

Loosely tethered and wildly driven by the sole purpose of being by his side, a string of pleas poured out of her mouth; "I want to see him, Arsal! I want to see him r-right now please take me to him! P-Please!"

"I'll take you to the hospital," he said after a pause. "But let's not tell others for now, specially chachi."

Iman acquiesced with a shaky nod, gulping down the lump in her throat to string out, "Let's not. Y-You're right, she will get so worried!"

"And very angry."

Confusion pulled at her lips. "Angry?"

"Yeah but forget that, you will eventually see it live anyway," Arsal said uneasily, scratching the side of his forehead, then puffed out a breath and stood up from the couch, pulling out his car keys.

"Let's go?"

Iman scrambled to her feet with a rapid nod, the strength somehow back in her legs. She wiped the damp stains of tears from her face and curled her fingers into her palm, sustaining her composure, before wending her way out of the building with him.

The darkening eve-sky was still packed with thick, damp clouds and a fine layer of mist coated the atmosphere as they both slid in his burgundy SUV and drove out of the Awan residence without any delay.

But delay stubbornly tailed along with them because after barely covering a few miles, they were caught in a gridlock caused by the heavy rainstorm that had struck the city earlier.

Long, stretched out queues of motionless, honking vehicles was all Iman could see as she sat in the car with her spliced nerves and restless heart. It was as if the universe had chosen today as the day of disasters, without a single hour of respite.